Quaerite Regnum Dei, Latin for «Seek ye the Kingdom of God», is a libre open source font. Quaerite Regnum Dei is based on a beautiful Spanish rotunda hand found in the Misal rico de Cisneros. In the early 16th century, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who was a cardinal in Spain, commissioned local monks/scribes to create a missal to be used in his Toledo cathedral.
The result is held by the Spanish National Library, who graciously created high resolution scans of it available to the whole world. I used their scans to make this font.
As this font is meant to look like handwriting, I decided that it was improper to make just one of each letter. So, the font contains two of each lowercase letter; some, such as ‹s›, have 5 alternates.
This font is almost done, but like all open source projects, you can help, and there are still things to do.
- The missal contains many combining marks; I have yet to implement any of them.
- Some glyphs in the missal might be missing. I did not look at every page. If you find a missing glyph, symbol or ligature in the big rotunda hand, please open a bug report. If you find a missing interesting alternate, do so as well please.
- It has spacing issues that could use sorting some day;† I didn't focus too much on spacing as due to its very thin minor stroke width, Quaerite Regnum Dei is best for large headlines, which I figured people would manually space. If you find a particularly badly spaced glyph, open a bug report. Please note what value you think it should be, or open a PR against features.fea to add it.
† If not by me, why not you! :-)